Cool rotary optical beat sequencer, based on a record turntable, from French media artists Jesse Lucas, Erwan Raguenes and YRO. It’s called Dyskograf, and consists of a record player fit with a white paper disk. Black marks at various distances from the spindle are detected by a camera and interpreted, in real time, as different rhythmic and melodic sounds. There’s obviously a practical limit to the length of the phrase you can repeat, but it does seem like it would be fun to play around with. [Thanks, Rachel!]

I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c’t – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.